Can CSS be used for serious print jobs? To find out, we decided to take the ultimate challenge: to produce the next edition of our book directly from HTML and CSS files. In this article we sketch our solution and quote from the style sheet used. Towards the end we describe the book microformat (boom!) we developed in the process…

…A printed book has many features not seen on screens. There are page numbers, headers and footers, a table of contents, and an index. The content must be split into pages of fixed size, and cross-references within the book (for example, “see definition on page 35”) must be resolved. Finally, the content must be converted to PDF, which is sent to the printer.

Web browsers are good at dealing with pixels on a screen, but not very good at printing.

Yes, I am wondering the same thing about “Blogger”. I would like to print my blog like a scrapbook with pictures and text as a gift for my father who does not use a computer. If anyone gets an answer or solution on this, I would sure appreciate the info. Thanks.

I’m not familiar with how Blogspot/Blogger works. You will have to ask their customer support, but printing from “any” web page is a matter of hitting the print button and hoping the website designer used a CSS printing stylesheet to make it look good when it prints. :D Good luck.

Depends upon what you want to print and how. There are several book publishing sites which will take WordPress blog content and help you convert it into books. If you just want to print out a few pages, then hit print. If it doesn’t print pretty, then get a print.css stylesheet into your WordPress Theme. See Styling for Print on the WordPress Codex for help.

I would like to print my blog into a professional looking book. I’ve looked into blurb.com, but their software Booksmart didn’t “slurp” my pictures in, so I will have to manually load them into the book. I found a way to save my wordpress blog as a PDF file, but I want my book to look professional and bound into a hard cover book, not just printed off pages. Any suggestions on companies/websites that support wordpress or if wordpress offers the option of creating a professional looking book?

If you want a professional looking book, then export all your posts and import them into a word processor or book publishing software and start editing and cleaning things up. Professional books aren’t created from blogs. You don’t make great tasting fudge from mud. It takes the right ingredients and tools to make great fudge, and great books.

A dear friend of mine died recently and there are literally hundreds of people around the world who are mourning his passing. (He was an incredible adventurer and traveller, as well as being a reknowned kayaker and rock climber.) We would like to find a way to use a web site to allow many people to each upload stories and photos, and then eventually print that all out as a book, so that we all have something permanent we can treasure. As far as i can tell, the various blog sites and publishing technologies/products (blogger, wordpress, blog2print) are really intended to allow one person to publish a series of blog entries, rather than being very useful for a group project like this. Am I missing anything? Because it’s such a large and distributed group, there has to be a good measure of “quick and easy” as opposed to allowing us to make the world’s most aesthetic book.

An interesting approach – and with a number of sites now allowing you to print on demand i guess its better than just using the copier. UK bloggers will probably be familiar with the various print on demand suppliers so i won’t plug them here.

Making your own blog into a book is a good idea – you can even then sell the book from the blog. The quality of the print is important though, as you want to offer a good product at the end of the day.

yes it is not trivial, but it certainly is possible to print your blog as a book. There are a number of companies doing that. You might want to check out blurb, blog2print or our company Feedfabrik. Then judge yourself which one you prefer.

We do not use MS Word or anything like that in the background. Our printing is based on a professional typesetting machine to get the look and feel of a “real” book. For self-hosted WordPress we have a plugin that provides you with a new “print” button in the admin interface.

This is an interesting service. I want my blog to be turned into book as well. Actually, I am interested in making ebooks to sell. However, I no enough time to learn how to make ebooks and how to market them.

WordPerfect, Word, and many word processing programs will now export into HTML or PDF. Who has time to learn anything anymore when software does it for you. This is an article from many years ago, before ebooks gained popularity.